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🎯 For anyone who just created an account and wants to know where to begin
Most companies already have processes running. People get hired, expenses get approved, tickets get resolved. What's usually missing isn't the process itself — it's visibility over it, control as volume grows, and the capacity to do more without growing the team.
That's exactly where Pipefy comes in. This guide helps you understand the platform's logic before you start building — because when the mental model is clear, everything that follows happens much faster.
📖 What you'll understand here:
What a process is — and how Pipefy connects with it
Before talking about pipes and cards, it's worth understanding what a process is.
A process is any sequence of steps your company repeats to reach a result. Onboarding an employee is a process. Approving an expense is a process. Resolving an IT ticket is a process. Closing a contract with a supplier is a process.
The problem is that most of these sequences live scattered — across emails, spreadsheets, WhatsApp messages, and people's memory. When someone is out, information disappears. When volume increases, control decreases. When the company grows, rework grows with it.
Pipefy solves this problem by centralizing the process in a single digital place, structured and visible to the whole team. Beyond that: once a process lives inside Pipefy, it can be automated — and eventually managed by AI Agents that make decisions, validate data, and execute tasks without manual intervention.
You start simple — digitizing what already exists. And you evolve at your own pace, adding automations and intelligence as the process matures.
You don't need to reinvent your processes to use Pipefy. Just digitize what already works today — and then let the platform do the heavy lifting.
The three concepts that explain everything
Pipe — the process
A pipe represents one of your company's processes inside Pipefy. If you have an employee onboarding process, it becomes a pipe. Everything that happens within that process — the steps, the information collected, the people involved, the automations — happens inside that pipe.
You can create pipes to manage Recruiting, IT Tickets, Procurement, Onboarding, and any other process that needs control and visibility.
- Learn more: What are pipes
Phase — the step
Each pipe has phases, which represent the steps the team must go through to complete the work. These are the columns you see on the screen.
Example: in an employee onboarding process, the phases might be:
Pending Documents → Equipment Requested → Access Configured → Done
The phase shows, visually and in real time, where each request stands in the process — for the whole team at the same time.
- Learn more: The basics about phases
Card — the request
A card is a specific demand within the process. Each employee being onboarded becomes a card. Each purchase order becomes a card. The card moves through the pipe's phases as the process progresses.
Each card brings together everything the team needs to work on that demand: collected data, assignees, activity history, comments, and files.
Cards can represent:
- A candidate in a recruiting process
- An order in a procurement process
- A ticket in an IT process
- Or any other demand you need to track
- Learn more: What is a card
If it feels abstract: think of the pipe as a production line. The phase is each station on that line. The card is the item moving through it — with all information and history recorded.
How the three elements connect
When someone fills out a form linked to your pipe, Pipefy automatically creates a card in the first phase. From there, the card moves through the phases — manually or via automations — until it's completed.
This means the entire process becomes visible, traceable, and controlled in one place. No lost email. No outdated spreadsheet. No manual work that could have been automatic.
Where to start in practice
Now that the mental model makes sense, the next step is creating your first pipe — from zero to your first card running, in about 15 minutes.
Before you move on, confirm you understand:
☐ What a process is and why it needs structure
☐ What a pipe is and what it represents
☐ What a phase is and what role it plays
☐ What a card is and what it stores
☐ Which process in your company you want to set up first
